Wednesday, June 27, 2012

It All Began When...

...My friend Max decided we should make a game. Easily said, more difficult of course to do. I'd done a little game-ish programming for fun over the years, most recently a sort of 2D prototype game, which I'd been inspired to make as a Dwarf Fortress / Minecraft sort of thing (I didn't realize at the time that Notch had been aiming for a 3D Dwarf Fortress, and ended up with something quite other, much to his benefit).

My previous little project fell by the wayside as such things do (but I did garner quite a bit of useful code from it for this project). So I started something new (Gratuitous screenshot of the current test project):

6/27/2012 'Settler 2' Project Screenshot

At any rate, Max and I began laying out our plans, and I began writing some code. I'm definitely no 3D expert; I consider myself pretty beginner, though perhaps less so now. One thing that has helped me tremendously has been the useful posts, advice and examples I've found around the net.

Thus I decided to start a development blog, and begin posting about what I was doing. Besides making and interesting record, maybe some of the things here will prove interesting or useful to someone. Or possibly just be fun to laugh at the weird things that happen. Probably more of the latter.

6/27/2012 'Settler 2' Project Screenshot. Cave-ish Bits

I've done quite a lot over the last year or so, though I actually started with a quite hefty server system. But I'm going to start on the front end, with my current experiments. These aren't directly related to the game we have in mind (much to Max's frustration, might I add).

However, this pretty much had to be done, because I fully admit that I had no idea what I was doing before. And I generally refuse to just grab code from the 'net, plug it in, and try to go. I want to understand what it does, otherwise I don't think there's any way you can make anything new or creative.

I think I may be getting to that point, though my math is... Ok I was going to say 'rough', but I think I will just leave it alone.

In the next post I'll start talking about the technical stuff.

Anyway, as a final screenshot, here is where the above project more or less began. Well, the 2nd iteration, anyway...: